QUANTIFYING CONSUMERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF LEAN FINELY TEXTURED BEEF by Melissa G.S. McKendree, David A. Widmar, and Nicole J. Olynk Widmar Working Paper #14-3 June 2014 Dept. of Agricultural Economics Purdue University It is the policy of Purdue University that all persons have equal opportunity and access to its educational programs, services, activities, and facilities without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin or ancestry, marital status, parental status, sexual orientation, disability or status as a veteran. Purdue University is an Equal Opportunity/Equal Access/Affirmative Action institution. QUANTIFYING CONSUMERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF LEAN FINELY TEXTURED BEEF by David A. Widmar and Nicole J. Olynk Widmar Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907-2056 Email: [email protected]; [email protected] Melissa G.S. McKendree Department of Agricultural Economics, Kansas State University Manhattan, KS 66506-4011 Email: [email protected] Working Paper #14-3 June 2014 Abstract Consumers today are increasingly interested in how their food is produced, especially meat and livestock products. The media sources consumers use for information on food production and safety are changing, as evidenced by the lean finely textured beef (LFTB) event in the spring of 2012. Social media and online availability of information are changing not only the mode of communication, but rapidly increasing the speed of information and knowledge exchange. The objectives of this analysis are to quantify the media stories surrounding LFTB and to characterize consumers’ concern, knowledge and purchasing behavior about LFTB. Media counts were constructed using the LexisNexis Academic Database using “All News English” and “Major World Publications” sources. The main peaks in the number of media stories occurred the week of March 25th, two weeks after the airing of an ABC News story that was widely viewed to have been at the forefront of the LFTB debate in 2012. However, LFTB stories continued beyond March 2012 and were still being published throughout the entire period analyzed. Of the eight topics investigated, consumer and government were the most discussed topics in conjunction with LFTB. LFTB producers and meat processors topics lagged behind other topics, potentially indicating a reactive approach by these groups. In order to better understand consumers’ concerns, knowledge and perceptions of LFTB a survey was conducted; most participants had heard of “pink slime” (the name used in the media for LFTB) while only about one-third had heard of LFTB. Only 11% of participants indicated they had purchased LFTB in the past six months, however, 80% reported purchasing ground beef in the past six months, leading to questions surrounding consumers linking LFTB to ground beef. Most participants were not willing to purchase LFTB in the future. Keywords: beef, consumer perceptions, lean finely textured beef, meat, media, pink slime JEL Codes: Q13, Q18 Copyright © by Melissa G.S. McKendree, David A. Widmar, and Nicole J. Olynk Widmar. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies. Introduction Consumers are increasingly interested in practices used to produce food, including on-farm production, processing and preparation; this interest could be fueled by ease of information exchange through the internet and social media. A phenomenon in today’s news media is that information is swept through non-traditional channels, like Facebook and Twitter, in addition to major news networks, blogs and popular press outlets. “[F]ood, and its level of safety is an emotional topic, and opinions and statements about it are often not science based” (Pruitt and Detre, 2012). Social media outlets allow for rapid exchange, but are not usually fact checked. The events surrounding lean finely textured beef (LFTB) demonstrate today’s rapid information exchange. LFTB is a beef product that is added to ground beef, sausage, lunchmeat and canned meats to increase the leanness of the meat (Greene, 2012). The process used to create LFTB was developed by Beef Products Inc. (BPI) in 1991 to increase the lean percentage of ground beef (Green, 2012). LFTB is made by heating beef trimmings and then placing them in a centrifuge to separate the fat from the meat; this results in a product that 94% to 97% lean beef (Greene, 2012). Next, LFTB undergoes an ammonium hydroxide antimicrobial process to kill pathogens, specifically, E. coli O157:H7,5 and Salmonella (Greene, 2012). Then, LFTB is quick- frozen and pressed before being added to ground beef and other meats (Greene, 2012). The process used to create LFTB was, and still is, deemed safe by the USDA (Greene, 2012). Media outlets were teeming with LFTB, or “pink slime,” stories in early 2012. On March 7, 2012, ABC News aired a report highlighting the potentially controversial production practices used to produce LFTB. Additionally, two days prior to the ABC News story, The Daily reported that the USDA was buying LFTB for the school lunch program (Greene, 2012). This, however, was not the first exposure of LFTB in popular press. LFTB’s safety was questioned in Food, Inc. in 2008, in the New York Times in 2009 and on Jamie Oliver’s show “Food Revolution” in 2011 (Detre and Gunderson, 2012). The LFTB outcry demonstrates one of the largest uses of social media to condemn a food product (or production process) that was deemed safe by the USDA (Detre and Gunderson, 2012). Restaurants and retail grocers began to take notice; in February 2012, Burger King and McDonald’s announced they would no longer use LFTB indicating that the decision to remove BPI from their list of suppliers of ground meat was due to keeping with corporate strategy (Eckley and McEowen, 2012). By April 2012, BPI, the largest producer of LFTB, had suspended operations at three out of its four locations (Eckley and McEowen, 2012). A better map of the LFTB event and understanding of consumer perceptions of LFTB will aid in the prevention, or at least reduced negative impacts, of future food safety scares. The objectives of this analysis are to quantify the media stories occurring over the time period during which LFTB received the most attention and to characterize consumers’ concern, knowledge and purchasing behavior surrounding LFTB. It is hypothesized that the number of media stories will vary among keyword groups (consumer versus government, for example), that participants will indicate limited knowledge about LFTB and that most participants will be opposed to purchasing the product in the future. Through the use of two distinct data sources, media counts and the consumer survey, the authors hope to detail how much information was available to consumers in the media, how much of this information they retained and if knowledge, perceptions and purchasing behaviors surround LFTB are related to demographic information. 3 Materials and Methods Lean Finely Textured Beef in the Media It is widely assumed that publically available information affects consumer perceptions of product quality (Tonsor and Olynk, 2011; Basmann, 1956; Mojduska and Caswell, 2000; Piggott and Marsh, 2004). These perceptions then have influence over consumption decisions. Following Tonsor and Olynk (2011), the LexisNexis Academic Database was used to develop counts of media stories on LFTB using public information. In particular, the core keywords used in the searches were: ((pink slime) or (lean finely textured beef) or (lean beef trimmings) or (LFTB) or (boneless lean beef trimmings) or (BLBT) or (soylent pink)) AND ((ground beef) or hamburger or burger or filler or beef or meat or (ground chuck) or beefsteak or (ground sirloin) or (ground round) or food)). In order to better understand the content of LFTB media stories, additional constraints were needed to differentiate these media stories by topic. The general LFTB search was categorized in eight additional ways that can be found in Appendix A. These additional topics are referred to as: retailers, consumer, food safety, beef producers/agriculture, government, fast food chains, meat processors (excluding BPI and Cargill and AFA), and LFTB producers. By introducing these topic specific counts, a more accurate depiction of the article content and information can be created. Two different source types were utilized within the LexisNexis database, “Major World Publications” (MWP) and “All News English” (ANE). According to LexisNexis (2013), MWP “contains full-text news sources from around the world which are held in high esteem for their content reliability. This includes the world's major newspapers, magazines and trade publications which are relied upon for the accuracy and integrity of their reporting.” A total of 631 sources are listed for MWP. Additionally, the ANE “group file contains English language, full-text news sources” (LexisNexis, 2013); nearly 6000 sources are listed. It should be noted that the ANE sources include the MWP sources. The selection of these two source categories allows a picture to be created of the major news sources (i.e. MWP) versus more “popular press” (i.e. ANE) sources. No distinction is made between articles that are against the use of LFTB and those that are for the use of LFTB; these are equally considered in the count. Daily counts were limited to a five month period surrounding the March 7, 2012 ABC News segment (Avila, 2012a), which ignited intense public backlash against the use of LFTB. Although the March 7th airing is attributed to have sparked the largest response, LFTB has been featured in other stories in past years (Andrews, 2012). Therefore, a longer period was analyzed on a weekly basis to allow expansion beyond the period of concentrated focus on LFTB in the Spring of 2012. Weekly information was collected for November 1, 2011 to October 15, 2012, while daily information was collected for January 1, 2012 to June 15, 2012.